Francis Danby A.R.A. 1793-1861
Early Morning: Fisherman’s Home
Oil on canvas, 55.5 x 81 cm.
Signed and dated ‘F. Danby 1841’
Provenance: probably, Collection of John Farnworth of Woolton; his sale, Christie’s, 18 May 1874, lot 49
Francis Danby was born at Common, Killinick, County Wexford on 16 November 1793. Following the death of his father, the family moved to Dublin in 1807. There, Danby studied at the Dublin Society’s Schools, exhibiting with the Society of Artists in 1813. He continued his studies under the tutelage of James Arthur O’Connor (c.1792-1841), and the pair, alongside George Petrie (1790-1866), visited England in 1813. Running out of money, O’Connor and Petrie returned to Dublin, but Danby persisted, finding patronage in Bristol. Remaining there for more than a decade, Danby undertook a painting trip to Norway in 1825, a trip that would alter his artistic output for the remainder of his career.
In 1825, writing to his patron, John Gibbons, Danby opined that Norway held ‘beautiful scenes…extremely picturesque on a smaller scale, indeed by far the most beautiful I ever saw.’ It would take almost two decades for the title of an exhibited work to directly reference Norway, however. This led Eric Adams (author of Francis Danby: Varieties of Poetic Landscape, 1973, Yale) to believe that Danby probably revisited Norway in 1840. Francis W. Greenacre (author of Francis Danby, 1988, Tate) later rebuffed this idea, claiming that evidence of such a trip did not exist. Whether Danby revisited Norway or not, Norway was on his mind in 1841. In that year, he exhibited Liensfiord Lake, in Norway at the Royal Academy, London, a painting now with the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. While a ‘Liensfiord’ does not exist, it may have been confused with Fensfjorden, a fjord north of Bergen. Danby was profoundly affected by his visit to Norway, later revealing that his pictures were generally ‘of Norway or poetical’. John King’s (1788-1847) portrait of Danby (Bristol Museum & Art Gallery), exhibited in 1829, presents the artist as sketching a landscape high in the Norwegian mountains; ‘presumably how Danby wished himself to be seen,’ suggested Adams.
The present, rediscovered work is the earliest known version of one of Danby’s most famous compositions, The Fisherman’s Home, based on sketches in Norway. In 1846, Danby exhibited Sunrise - The Fisherman’s Home with the Royal Academy. The oil, 30 x 42 inches, depicted steps leading to a thatched house built into a rocky mound of land, shaded by trees, with figures carrying nets and tackle to a moored boat in the foreground. The painting was engraved by Arthur Willmore (illustrated), and appeared in The Art Journal in 1852. According to The Art Journal, the painting was based on the banks of a river in Norway, a detail later restated by Walter G. Strickland (A Dictionary of Irish Artists, 1913, Maunsel). Sunrise... was part of the Vernon Collection, given to the National Gallery in 1847, and transferred to the Tate before it was destroyed in World War II. A handful of versions of The Fisherman’s Home have surfaced at auction in recent decades, typically sketch-like in nature and unsigned, depicting sunrises and sunsets. However, in Greenacre’s index of Danby’s works, the author references the lost painting, Early Morning: Fisherman’s Home, sold at John Farnworth’s sale at Christie’s, 18 May 1874, lot 49. A key detail specified was the size of the canvas, 22 x 31 inches, the same size as the present work and substantially different from all other known versions. Coupled with the painting’s narrative of the rising sun and the fisherman headed towards his boat, it is likely that the present work and Farnworth’s are one and the same. John Farnworth was a prosperous timber merchant who became Mayor of the Borough of Liverpool in 1865. Other works from his collection included paintings by John Linnell (1792-1882) and a watercolour by J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), now with the British Museum, London (number 1910,0212.276).
Danby lived his final years in the port town of Exmouth in Devon, where he died in 1861. According to Samuel Redgrave, ‘Danby will always take high rank with the lovers of art and genius. His imagination was of the highest class, his landscapes of the truest poetry’ (A Dictionary of Artists of the English School, 1878, G. Bell & Sons).